Strumpet City

CHAPTER TWO

On Thursday, the eleventh day of July 1907, King Edward honoured the races at Leopardstown with his royal presence and on Friday 12th he sailed away, leaving behind him a genteel glow of goodwill and friendliness, marred only by a piece of gossip which turned out eventually to be true. Mr. William Martin Murphy, Chairman of the Exhibition Committee, owner of Independent Newspapers, a large drapery business and a hotel, controlling director of the Dublin Tramway Company and several other large-scale ventures, had refused a knighthood at the opening of the exhibition. Yearling, who was in intimate contact with the business gossip of the city, being a director himself, told Father O’Connor about it when they met one day along the harbour front. Father O’Connor was reading his office. Yearling, looking spruce and smart in a grey suit with a flower in his buttonhole, tapped him on the shoulder.

‘And how are things spiritual, Father?’ he asked.

Father O’Connor closed his missal, marking the place carefully with a red silk tab. He matched Yearling’s light-hearted humour.

‘That is a difficult question to answer. If I say they are satisfactory I may be guilty of presumption, and if I say they are bad I am opening the door to Despair.’ He settled his missal under his armpit. ‘Perhaps my best answer is that we continue to trust in God.’

Yearling swung his cane and pointed out to sea.

‘Before you came along I was watching that small boat. The thought occurred to me that there was something which has changed little in two thousand years. The boat, the fishermen, their nets.’

Father O’Connor’s eyes followed the pointing stick. The boat moved gently with the motion of the water. Behind it a series of cork floats, spread in a wide semicircle, marked the line of the net. He had not noticed before.

‘The humblest of men,’ he said, ‘yet when He called to them, they followed.’

Yearling’s heavy eyebrows went upwards. He was in an impish mood.

‘Not quite, Father. He had to put on a little bit of magic for them. Didn’t He walk on the water?’

‘That was later,’ Father O’Connor corrected. Yearling’s scepticism did not disturb him. He was, after all, only a Protestant.

‘He did something,’ Yearling insisted. ‘Let me think now.’

‘After a night spent catching nothing, He filled their nets with fish.’

‘Ah,’ Yearling said. That was his point.

‘We must remember who they were. Poor fishermen, ignorant and illiterate. How else was He to win them to Him?’

‘Could He not simply inspire them with Faith?’

‘He wanted them to know their vocation. Remember what He said to them?’

‘What was that?’ Yearling asked, unable to remember.

‘Henceforth you shall be fishers of men.’

Yearling looked sceptical.

‘It’s too damned literary to be true,’ he objected. ‘I feel somebody made it up.’

Father O’Connor pursed his lips and then articulated carefully. ‘The substance of your complaint seems to be that Christ could be graphic and direct. But aren’t these the marks of leadership always?’

‘I don’t expect parlour tricks from God. And why fishermen?’ Yearling mused as they went. ‘Why not start at the top?’

‘Perhaps because it is easier to get the fisherman to leave his net,’ Father O’Connor said.

‘Yes. It takes more than a parlour trick to get a banker to leave his gold.’

‘Quite,’ Father O’Connor agreed.

‘The poor are generally regarded as being more religious than the rich,’ Yearling continued, ‘but of course that isn’t true. They are simply more impressionable and have less to lose.’

Father O’Connor considered for a moment and before speaking pitched his voice so that it would sound polite.

‘Your Church believes that worldly success is a measure of spiritual worthiness; you believe that material well-being and good fortune are marks of God’s favour and that ill fortune is a manifestation of His disapproval. Do you know the story of Dives and Lazarus?’

‘I do,’ Yearling said firmly, ‘and I regard it as the mad creation of some socialist fancy.’

Then he broke out into a loud peal of laughter which brought both of them to a standstill.

‘Forgive me, Father,’ he said contritely, ‘I am presuming too much on our friendship.’

Father O’Connor said: ‘It is better to explore an idea than to keep a polite silence.’

‘You are not offended?’

‘Who am I to be offended?’ Father O’Connor asked.

‘Well then, you must prove it by having coffee with me,’ Yearling insisted.

Father O’Connor accepted graciously. They strolled up the town together, Yearling with a happy spring in his step, his light cane swinging joyfully, his tall, tweed-clad figure with its gay buttonhole matching the sunshine of the morning. Father O’Connor, shorter and more sombre in his black clerical garb, acknowledged at intervals the salutes of his parishioners. Some were old women, some were carters and delivery men, some were little boys who touched their forelocks respectfully. To all he raised his hat and smiled.

‘I’ll concede this,’ Yearling commented, ‘you chaps keep the honour and respect of your flock.’

‘It ought to act as a reminder of our unworthiness,’ Father O’Connor said.

‘Nothing to be ashamed of,’ Yearling said, holding open the glass door of the coffee lounge for him. ‘Society is hierarchical. If they stop saluting you they’ll find something else to salute. And it might not be as worthy.’

They walked across luxurious carpet and joined Mr. Yearling’s colleagues. Father O’Connor recognised Mr. Harrison, a member of the Decorations Committee. The aromas of coffee and cigar smoke, blending pleasantly in the sun-filled room, made him feel urbane and important. He was a young curate in a rich parish, welcomed for his office and his pleasant manners by the important men of the town. He stirred his coffee with careful elegance. Yearling’s bubbling energy had not abated. He beamed over his cup at Harrison and said:

‘Congratulations on an excellent job of work.’

‘In what respect?’ Harrison asked.

‘The decorations. Magnificent. Didn’t you think so, Father?’

‘A credit,’ Father O’Connor said.

‘We all did our share,’ Harrison acknowledged, modestly.

‘Better show here than in Herbert Park. I suppose you heard . . .’

‘I know what you’re going to say: That Murphy refused to be knighted. It sounds incredible.’

‘It’s perfectly true. I had the whole story from an official source. The King called for his sword, but the Lord Lieutenant had to whisper that it was no dice.’

‘With everybody looking on?’

‘In front of a galaxy of gapers.’

‘Good God!’

‘What is Mr. Murphy?’ Father O’Connor asked.

‘One of our own—a Catholic,’ someone blundered.

‘No . . . I mean, politically speaking,’ Father O’Connor hastened to explain.

‘A Constitutional Nationalist,’ Yearling said. ‘The crown for Ireland and West African concessions for William Martin.’

Everybody laughed. Yearling continued:

‘But you must not think it was a question of politics, Father. It was rumoured beforehand that Murphy had organised the exhibition and asked for chairmanship simply to get a knighthood. It so happens that organisers of exhibitions elsewhere had been honoured in that way. When Murphy heard the rumour he told Aberdeen that on no account would he accept such an honour. It appears that the message was not transmitted in time to the King, with the result that William had to say no in public. What do you think of that, Father?’

‘I think Mr. Murphy demonstrated that he is a strong-minded man and a man of principle,’ Father O’Connor said.

‘After the event he sent a letter to His Excellency asking him to explain his refusal to the King. It was delivered at Leopardstown races. I happen to know that it contained this.’

They looked at him expectantly. Yearling, their attention securely held, changed his voice and articulated with great emphasis.

‘I would not wish that His Majesty should leave Ireland thinking that he had left one churlish man behind him.’

Harrison voiced the feelings of the rest.

‘That was well said.’

Yearling looked derisive, but the rest agreed with Harrison. Father O’Connor reflected on the incident and felt admiration for the man, as much for his show of moral courage as for his gracious expression of regret. He felt that with men of like character at the head of Ireland’s business affairs the country must surely prosper. It was an added satisfaction to have gathered that the man concerned was a Catholic as well.

Harrison, not to be outdone in the matter of inside information, put down his cup with a compelling clatter and said:

‘Of course you know what happened at the Viceregal Lodge. I mean about Vicars and the Crown Jewels?’

‘I’d forgotten Vicars would be there.’

‘When Vicars was presented the King shook him by the hand—most warmly, I believe—and held a cordial and cheerful conversation with him. So what price Birrell now?’

‘A handshake and a smile won’t deflect our friend Birrell,’ Yearling said. ‘By God no!’

The others raised their eyebrows, disapproving of his language in front of the priest. Father O’Connor smiled and waved his hands to convey that he was not put out by full-blooded talk. They went on to discuss the theft, a subject on which each had a theory. When Father O’Connor rose and excused himself they stood politely and bowed him out. Then they resumed more freely.

Father O’Connor went into the church to pray a little before lunch. There was a man in front of him whose ragged coat was tied about the middle with a piece of cord. He had a dirty beard and his remaining teeth stood up like cartridges in his hungry face. Father O’Connor’s mind wandered from his prayers. The face particularly held his attention. A scavenger’s bag swung from his waist. The man left almost immediately. Father O’Connor, alone now in front of the altar, reproached himself for the pride he had felt a little while before. He was not endowed with a talent for bringing Christ’s word to the men of business or for living according to Christ’s wish while among them. He was not clever enough, nor was he strong enough to endure the small temptations to worldliness and conceit without becoming their tool instead of being their master. And it was not only the respect of the prominent which would corrupt him. There was corruption in the submissiveness of the ladies’ committees, in the deference to his superior musical knowledge on the part of the humble organist and the choir, in the assumption of his genteel parishioners that to have good breeding, a clean person and unremitting politeness was to honour Christ as He had commanded.

Father O’Connor left the centre aisle and knelt before the shrine of St. Anthony to continue his novena for the recovery of his mother’s rosary. She had given him the beads when he was a young student, a Galway rosary of amber and silver which had belonged to her mother before her. They were the only memento he had of her, a cherished link with the love he had lost when she died. Perhaps, thought Father O’Connor, their loss was part of God’s plan to chasten him, a trial to take his mind from the vanities of the genteel world around him, so that this grief would be with him to draw his thoughts back to the verities. Their disappearance was mysterious enough. At first he had thought the beads must be in the Bradshaw’s house, because he had first missed them after their musical evening. But they searched thoroughly and found nothing. They were not in his rooms or in the vestry. Father O’Connor prayed fervently and humbly. It remained now with St. Anthony, in whom he placed his last hope.

He rose after a while and left the church, finding it a relief now to close the door of the Parish House and leave the sunshine to those whose moods were a better match for it. His room was high up in the house, a quiet, carpeted retreat with two devotional pictures from which the faces of Christ and the Madonna brooded over the well-bound volumes that lined each wall. A letter lay on the table which had not been there when he left. He picked it up and read it, then he put it down and sat for a long time in thought. The letter promised him the transfer he had asked for. He would be posted to work among the poor in the first months of the New Year. God, he was now certain, was truly intervening to shape his life for him. Father O’Connor, sitting alone in the quiet, sunless room, felt his eyes pricking with tears of gratitude, and his heart being filled to overflowing with love of Christ.